The incognito divine guest in a mortal house: the name is refused (or withheld) for the duration of the visit, and the moment of the name — asked for or finally spoken — coincides with fire, the god's departure, and mortal peril for the host.
Manoah, hosting an unrecognized divine visitor, asks 'What is thy name, that when thy sayings come to pass we may do thee honour?' and is refused: 'Why askest thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret?' (Heb. pil'i, 'wonderful'). The visitor then ascends in the flame of the altar, and Manoah cries 'We shall surely die, because we have seen God.'
Geirroth's tortured guest between the fires withholds his name for eight nights, then reveals it as sentence and departure at once — 'Now am I Othin, Ygg was I once' (st. 54) — and in the prose ending the king, realizing whom he has hosted, stumbles onto his own sword, 'and it pierced him through, and slew him. Odin then vanished.'
Both scenes are structured as hospitality tests with the same beat order: unrecognized visitor, host's inquiry/failure, name-moment, flame (altar flame / the two fires), instant divine exit, host facing death (Manoah's 'we shall surely die'; Geirroth dead on his sword). The name functions as the detonator in both — it is precisely what cannot be safely held inside the visit.
Our fact-checkers corrected the first draft:
The identical test, posed and failed: the world-encircling sea-serpent hooked from a small boat, drawn up just far enough for a face-to-face look, and then lost.
Divinity presents a surplus of names and titles in public while the one operative name is withheld · concealment by multiplication in the Norse text, concealment by explicit sealing in the Greek, with public epithets issued as cover in both.
At the exact point where the text must name the ultimate, both hand over an admitted placeholder · a verb-phrase, a 'designation' · and record on the page that the true name is not being given.
The same three-stage avian reconnaissance protocol from a grounded vessel, with overlapping species (dove, raven) and the identical inferential logic: the bird that does not come back is the good news.